Blend Creations is our first-born, our pet project, our livelihood and a manifestation of our creativity — and it’s turning 5 this month!

We thought it would be fun to show a few of the ways we’ve changed in the last 5 years.

Employees

Then: 2 employees — a Jack- and Jill- of all trades, but designers by training. We’d been married for almost 4 months when BlendCreations.com was officially launched.

Now: 2.5 employees — We’ve been joined by our pre-schooler junior VP. (Thanks to Kym Shumsky for the great photo).

Studio & Equipment

Then: A 6′ x 4′ storage closet that held a scroll saw and a grinding wheel to hand-cut inlays.  (The space was so small, that it wasn’t possible to get a photo of the entire area).

Now: A 12′ x 25′ dedicated studio space with fancy toys like a CNC-controlled router (shown, cutting some mother of pearl inlay) and a laser-engraver (shown with a brand-new laser-engraved custom Metal for Monsters pendant).

Website

Then: A hand-coded HTML website with PayPal buttons. We originally launched the site with about 30 products and had dozens of sales by the time 2005 was over.

Now: Well, if you’re reading this blog post on the website, then you see where we’re at now — a real shopping cart system that not only accepts PayPal, but Visa & Mastercard in both USD and CAD, thanks to the fine team of web developers at Aeolidia.  We now have over 200 products (not including all the color options available for each product).  Since 2005, we’ve had thousands of sales, thanks to our many awesome and loyal customers.

Branding:

Then: Our very first logo was created more for use in print advertising than on the website. When we first started, we weren’t able to brand our products or our packaging economically.

Now: Our logo today is much more simplified and we now have the capability (thanks to a laser engraver) of branding most of our contemporary jewelry products as well as our packaging.

It’s been an amazing journey thus far, and we can only imagine what the next five years will bring.  We’ve been fortunate enough to have people who like our stuff (in a Facebook sense and in a ‘what cool products you have’ sense) that the job of running this company is more than a job; it’s a pleasure.

As thanks to all of our customers, we’ll be offering up some special birthday promotions.  Make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter as they’ll be announced soon!